An exciting peek at a few areas of the new guide, RTR...
Posted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 4:14 pm
Ladies,
I just wanted to give you an additional Christmas peek at a few other areas we'll be including within our new guide RTR. As part of the teacher-directed time, we'll be going through the book Looking at Pictures once each week. Here's a link to the publisher's description:
http://www.abramsbooks.com/Books/Lookin ... 82888.html
The book includes beautiful full-color pictures of many paintings and provides a narrative text that teaches details about the art of painting. It is very tastefully done and very appropriate for a more youthful audience. However, I enjoyed it as well. This fits so well with the renaissance time period and will help instill a love and understanding of the art of painting within the kiddos.
For Bible study, we will be scheduling a Philippians study that will go through the entire book of Philippians. It is titled "Hidden Treasures in Philippians", and you can peek inside it here: http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/ ... ew=details
This will go so well with the time period of the Resurrection to the Reformation, as we will begin RTR with Paul's ministry. We will schedule the Philippians study for the parent to lead twice weekly. Our plan at this point is for the kiddos to also memorize Philippians chapter 1 throughout the year and to have the option of singing it with The Bible in Stereo: Philippians 1 cd. Those who have done CTC, will already have memorized all of Philippians chapter 2 (along with the CD for that chapter from the same company). This will provide even more connections for the Philippians study in RTR, but it won't be necessary to have done CTC prior to doing RTR.
As far as poetry goes, at this point we are planning to focus on the poetry of Emily Dickinson for RTR. The teacher will lead the poetry readings once a week. While Dickinson was a bit of an eccentric there are all sorts of unproven claims about her life. We'll try to stick to sharing the known facts. In her lifetime she wrote approximately 1700 poems, and less than 6 were published during her lifetime. Her poetry was heavily edited and released after her death and often is seen in a quite changed form from her original poetry. She actually never titled her poems, but later editors added titles for her. She wrote many beautiful poems about nature and love, but seems to be remembered mainly for those she wrote about death. She is a major American poet and one worth studying for her many insightful poems. We will focus on her less heavy material and use as close to her original wording as possible.
One other teacher-led area will be the Medieval History-Based Writing Lessons from IEW. We are doing it this year with our oldest son and are reallly enjoying the lessons. The lessons have many natural connections to the history period studied within RTR, and the lessons are very well-done. We will schedule the lessons to be led by the teacher three times weekly but our schedule will keep the lessons purposefully short. Older students will have optional extensions for Day 4 if parents choose to use them.
While we have used other IEW products and found they were not a great fit for us, we find this particular product (written by a different author) to be refreshingly different. In searching for the best fit for each guide, we look for those products that match our philosophy best. We almost missed this product, due to thinking that all IEW products would not be a fit for us. Yet, as we're using the Medieval History-Based writing lessons this year, we find it to be very different from the Student Writing Intensive programs of IEW's that we used previously. Link to the publisher's website: http://www.excellenceinwriting.com/MHW-T
While IEW highly recommends that you utilize their TWSS overview course or their SWI course prior to utilizing the history-based writing lessons, the author of the Medieval Writing Lessons has done such an outstanding job with her writing that it is possible to pick up and use the Medieval Writing Lessons without any prior IEW experience. Her writing exercises are enjoyable and interesting and tackle some of the needed writing skills for upper level writing in a more creative way. In addition our plans will guide you day-by-day in using the guide with little to no prep. or planning. It will help you and your student have a great guided experience in writing.
We do still plan to utilize Write with the Best Vol. II eventually, however it is suited for a much older audience than Write with the Best Vol. I. Since there are only 2 volumes of Write with the Best that left us searching for other options. While we do still love Igniting Your Writing, the author of those programs has let us know that they will not be reprinting them when their stock runs out (as they are retired and doing missions work). So, that meant Igniting Your Writing was also not a viable option for scheduling in our guides in the long-term. The Lord works all things for good though, as we'd never have discovered the book we've selected for writing lessons otherwise.
Blessings,
Carrie
I just wanted to give you an additional Christmas peek at a few other areas we'll be including within our new guide RTR. As part of the teacher-directed time, we'll be going through the book Looking at Pictures once each week. Here's a link to the publisher's description:
http://www.abramsbooks.com/Books/Lookin ... 82888.html
The book includes beautiful full-color pictures of many paintings and provides a narrative text that teaches details about the art of painting. It is very tastefully done and very appropriate for a more youthful audience. However, I enjoyed it as well. This fits so well with the renaissance time period and will help instill a love and understanding of the art of painting within the kiddos.
For Bible study, we will be scheduling a Philippians study that will go through the entire book of Philippians. It is titled "Hidden Treasures in Philippians", and you can peek inside it here: http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/ ... ew=details
This will go so well with the time period of the Resurrection to the Reformation, as we will begin RTR with Paul's ministry. We will schedule the Philippians study for the parent to lead twice weekly. Our plan at this point is for the kiddos to also memorize Philippians chapter 1 throughout the year and to have the option of singing it with The Bible in Stereo: Philippians 1 cd. Those who have done CTC, will already have memorized all of Philippians chapter 2 (along with the CD for that chapter from the same company). This will provide even more connections for the Philippians study in RTR, but it won't be necessary to have done CTC prior to doing RTR.
As far as poetry goes, at this point we are planning to focus on the poetry of Emily Dickinson for RTR. The teacher will lead the poetry readings once a week. While Dickinson was a bit of an eccentric there are all sorts of unproven claims about her life. We'll try to stick to sharing the known facts. In her lifetime she wrote approximately 1700 poems, and less than 6 were published during her lifetime. Her poetry was heavily edited and released after her death and often is seen in a quite changed form from her original poetry. She actually never titled her poems, but later editors added titles for her. She wrote many beautiful poems about nature and love, but seems to be remembered mainly for those she wrote about death. She is a major American poet and one worth studying for her many insightful poems. We will focus on her less heavy material and use as close to her original wording as possible.
One other teacher-led area will be the Medieval History-Based Writing Lessons from IEW. We are doing it this year with our oldest son and are reallly enjoying the lessons. The lessons have many natural connections to the history period studied within RTR, and the lessons are very well-done. We will schedule the lessons to be led by the teacher three times weekly but our schedule will keep the lessons purposefully short. Older students will have optional extensions for Day 4 if parents choose to use them.
While we have used other IEW products and found they were not a great fit for us, we find this particular product (written by a different author) to be refreshingly different. In searching for the best fit for each guide, we look for those products that match our philosophy best. We almost missed this product, due to thinking that all IEW products would not be a fit for us. Yet, as we're using the Medieval History-Based writing lessons this year, we find it to be very different from the Student Writing Intensive programs of IEW's that we used previously. Link to the publisher's website: http://www.excellenceinwriting.com/MHW-T
While IEW highly recommends that you utilize their TWSS overview course or their SWI course prior to utilizing the history-based writing lessons, the author of the Medieval Writing Lessons has done such an outstanding job with her writing that it is possible to pick up and use the Medieval Writing Lessons without any prior IEW experience. Her writing exercises are enjoyable and interesting and tackle some of the needed writing skills for upper level writing in a more creative way. In addition our plans will guide you day-by-day in using the guide with little to no prep. or planning. It will help you and your student have a great guided experience in writing.
We do still plan to utilize Write with the Best Vol. II eventually, however it is suited for a much older audience than Write with the Best Vol. I. Since there are only 2 volumes of Write with the Best that left us searching for other options. While we do still love Igniting Your Writing, the author of those programs has let us know that they will not be reprinting them when their stock runs out (as they are retired and doing missions work). So, that meant Igniting Your Writing was also not a viable option for scheduling in our guides in the long-term. The Lord works all things for good though, as we'd never have discovered the book we've selected for writing lessons otherwise.
Blessings,
Carrie